Are web coders losing their respect for standards? A recent review of the world’s largest sites suggests so. ValidateHTML, a project by independent French developer Théo Ducreux, examined the contents of the 5,000 most widely used web domains, as estimated by the Tranco research project. They include the usual suspects (Google, YouTube, Akamai) plus those without public-facing components (Google’s “gstatic,” EZVIZ’s “Ezviz7”). Ducreux found more than half – 2,656 sites – served a home page readable by humans. Many of the others, such as Google and EZVIZ’s, were just traffic redirection sites, a beacon for a company’s products to call home. Headless or not, nearly 90 percent of these sites were not serving proper HTML, as specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group). These standards are important so that different browsers and reading tools can render the requested pages in more or less the same way. Ducreux tallied a total of 100,305 HTML violations (including the most recent HTML5 specs) across all these sites, plus an additional 18,863 CSS errors. In other words, 87.2 percent of sites violate web specs in at least one place. Only 12.8 percent have fully valid HTML. And only 2.6 percent of all sites are completely clean, returning zero errors and zero best-practice warnings. More alarming, over a third of sites failed accessibility checks, which to their owners is more of a legal liability (and hence a compliance issue) than an embarrassment, given the potential reach of the 2025 European Accessibility Act. (Here in the U.S., woe be the accessibility-inconsiderate e-commerce site that raises the ire of the National Federation of the Blind.) Accessibility-wise, 20.4 percent of sites are missing alt text on images, which often contain vital information. Worse, 41.6 percent of pages are missing ARIA labels that identify page regions, potentially leaving screen readers struggling to convey the page's structure. Here’s an iframe, figure it out. “Screen readers don't have anywhere near the error tolerance Chrome has, so markup that looks totally fine to you can be broken for someone using assistive tech,” Ducreux told The Register. For the project, he used a home-built web crawler and a set of open-source parsers (HTML-validate, CSS Validator, Lightning CSS, fast-xml-parser). “The site, the scoring, and the crawl logic are my own code,” Ducreux explained by email. Ducreux is the principal maintainer for the project and the site. "No team, no funding, no company." An electronic Tower of Babel Does lack of adherence to standards really matter? It's an open question. “The web is more a social creation than a technical one,” web creator Tim Berners-Lee wrote back in 1999. If we all go off and make our own standards, then it's harder to connect and communicate. The currently fashionable Dead Internet Theory – in which AI machines and not we meat sticks now make up most internet traffic – won’t get developers off the hook. As Shopify engineers have found, even superintelligence prefers shipshape markup. Browsers deserve part of the blame. Unless they have a fetish for the short-lived but brutally unforgiving XHTML, browsers today will just ignore any code they can’t grok. “Browsers are so good at error recovery that nothing forces anyone to fix” their code, Ducreux wrote on the site, “which is exactly why it accumulates.” Indulgence encourages slothfulness. Front-end frameworks create their own mischief. The single most common failure identified (in more than 59 percent of all the sites) is the misplaced element, aka incorrect tag nesting. Did you know you're not allowed to put a style element within a div box? Many frameworks do, evidently. “It is a nesting problem created at build time, not in an editor,” Ducreux wrote on the site. “Nobody writes that by hand.” Many folks believe sloppy HTML is no big deal, including some in the peanut gallery at Hacker News. One contributor noted that “HTML5 defines a method for turning more-or-less any sequence of bytes into the same DOM tree,” DOM being the Document Object Model the browser uses to understand a web page. Ducreux himself doesn’t see bad HTML as an existential threat to the web, outside of hindering accessibility, which can leave someone guessing at online content they may really need to understand. “Honestly, most invalid HTML doesn't break anything visible, browsers are built to guess what you meant and just patch it silently,” he wrote by e-mail. But at the same time, the web isn’t just about browsers. “AI agents reading pages, voice assistants, translation tools, screen readers – none of them have Chrome's 20 years of guessing your intent,” he wrote. “Writing to spec is what makes a page mean the same thing to all of them, not just to whoever's rendering it in Chrome that day.” ®

Payments biz Stripe has reportedly finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter for at least $7 billion, signaling a shift in focus for the AI industry. OpenRouter provides a way for customers to integrate multiple AI models into their workflow and infrastructure and is, by Ramp's measure, the most popular of the gateway companies that have sprung up to simplify model integration. By acquiring the AI gateway service, Stripe would become a mediator of AI token sales, fitting its core business while gaining access to valuable data about AI model usage. Stripe declined to comment, citing a policy of not addressing rumors or speculation. Prior to Bloomberg's report about the agreement, the Wall Street Journal said acquisition talks were underway. Akhil Verghese, founder and CEO of Krazimo, a developer of AI software for businesses, told The Register in an email that he found the acquisition fascinating because OpenRouter is to AI models what Stripe has been to financial infrastructure. "A key factor for me is the value," he said. "I won’t pretend to be smart enough to understand how these valuations work, but $7 billion for OpenRouter surprised me. They raised at a $1.3B post money valuation in May, and even if revenue has grown significantly since then and acquisitions often have an additional multiple, 5x in 3 months is nuts. "There are ways this acquisition makes sense, though. [Stripe CEO] Patrick Collison recently said that metered pricing is the native business model of the AI era. In purchasing OpenRouter, Stripe, which already controls where the money is going, now sees where the tokens are going." And there are a lot of tokens going around. An economics paper published last month, AI Premium, estimates total global LLM token consumption to be about 5 to 7 quadrillion per month, with about 2 percent of that being handled by OpenRouter. While marquee model makers Anthropic and OpenAI have focused on building their own brands and steering customers toward their tooling, the reality is that business customers prefer options that avoid lock-in and maintain negotiating power. That expectation and the potential fees for gatekeeping have led to the proliferation of AI gateway firms and to $113 million in funding for OpenRouter back in May. Verghese said rival AI gateways may find it more difficult to compete now that OpenRouter has access to so much funding. Anthropic and OpenAI account for a substantial amount of the tokens processed by virtue of their subsidized flat-rate subscription plans – generally served directly rather than through a gateway or third-party provider. But as they push customers toward API pricing in preparation for going public, they risk driving business toward providers of more affordable, open weight models. As of December 2025, OpenRouter reported serving more than 5 million developers to route traffic to more than 300 models from more than 70 providers. At the time, open weight models accounted for about 30 percent of tokens served. Today, the biz boasts more than 10 million developers and 80 providers. OpenAI in October 2025 was serving about 8.6 trillion tokens per day, according to Andreessen Horowitz, and OpenRouter was serving more than 1 trillion tokens per day. "The competitive frontier is no longer only about accuracy or benchmarks," said Malika Aubakirova and Anjney Midha from Andreessen Horowitz at the time. "It is about orchestration, control, and a model’s ability to operate as a reliable agent." It's about AI gateways and adjacent services that sit above models in the technical stack. According to Vercel, which offers its own AI Gateway, open weight models have seen their share of gateway token spend grow from 11 percent in April to 36 percent in July. Meanwhile, the token spend collected by the four largest frontier labs, which had not dipped below 93 percent in seven months, fell to 89 percent last month. Much of that came at Google's expense, with Chinese AI labs Z.ai and Moonshot capturing the growth in open weight spending. "GLM 5.2 and Kimi K3, both released in the last two months, are the first open-weight models running a meaningful share of the workloads historically owned by closed-weight labs," Vercel said. Even so, the top four frontier labs in the US continue to capture the lion's share of spending. Vercel said those companies took 95 percent of spending through its AI Gateway in June. "In July, Anthropic collected 65 percent of gateway spending on 30 percent of token volume, at 4.4 times the average price of every other lab's tokens," Vercel said. Open weight models, which have occupied the low end of the market (cheap tokens), have seen their fortunes shift, Vercel said. After their share of gateway token volume almost tripled between April and June, from 11 percent to 29 percent, capturing only four cents for every gateway dollar, they saw spending more than double to nearly nine cents for every dollar. Open weight models, in other words, are becoming better and are bringing in more revenue even as the average token price declined 13.6 percent in July. If the trend continues and AI usage drifts further toward open weight models and away from proprietary frontier models, the AI gateway business should prosper. Verghese expressed concern about whether OpenRouter will be able to maintain its neutrality under Stripe's roof. The workload router isn't supposed to play favorites in terms of where it directs tokens based on requirements, but should it start doing so, he said, the resulting loss of trust could be harmful. ®

AMERSFOORT (ANP) - Ongeveer veertig trekkers met boeren hebben op maandagavond een tocht door Amersfoort gemaakt, zegt een politiewoordvoerder. "Ze rijden rond en op bepaalde plekken leggen ze strobalen neer, en dan rijden ze verder." Op veel van de trekkers wapperden omgekeerde Nederlandse vlaggen, zag een ANP-verslaggever. Er werd veel getoeterd.

Op beelden van RTV Utrecht is te zien dat ze hooiballen hebben neergelegd bij een gebouw van FrieslandCampina. Ook hebben de boeren hooibalen achtergelaten bij Natuurmonumenten, Staatsbosbeheer en een kantoor van de Rabobank, meldt de regionale omroep. Over de Stier, een kunstwerk in het midden van een rotonde, werd ook hooi gegooid. Een woordvoerder van Rijkswaterstaat zei dat ze naar de stad toe niet over de snelweg hebben gereden.

In Barneveld kwamen op maandagavond honderden boeren bijeen voor het gemeentehuis, meldt AD. Ze wilden hun zorgen uiten over de stikstofplannen van het kabinet. Burgemeester Jacco van der Tak en een lokale LTO-voorzitter spraken de boeren toe.

TEL AVIV (ANP/RTR) - De Amerikaanse gezant Jared Kushner, de schoonzoon van president Donald Trump, verwacht dat mogelijk binnen een maand vooruitgang kan worden geboekt met het ontwapenen van Hamas en het uitvoeren van een vredesplan voor Gaza. Hij zei dat tegen Fox News, na een overleg met de Israëlische premier Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Hopelijk kunnen we dan beginnen met het weghalen van een deel van de wapens", zei Kushner in Tel Aviv. Het vullen van de tunnels in Gaza, die Hamas gebruikt voor militaire activiteiten en het smokkelen van goederen, kan volgens hem binnen dertig tot negentig dagen gebeuren.

Kushner zei dat er aan Israëlische kant nog zorgen zijn over het plan. Zo wil Israël de mogelijkheid houden om zichzelf te verdedigen tegen dreigingen. De Verenigde Staten zullen voor Israël het recht om zichzelf te verdedigen niet aan banden leggen als er sprake is van "dreigend gevaar", aldus Kushner. Volgens hem kan Gaza pas worden herbouwd als Hamas zijn wapens heeft ingeleverd.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De beurzen op Wall Street stonden maandag onder druk door groeiende zorgen over de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten. Het staakt-het-vuren tussen de VS en Iran loopt maandag officieel af. Iran sluit gesprekken over een verlenging van het akkoord uit. Ondertussen zei president Donald Trump maandag tegen Fox News dat de VS Oman zouden platbombarderen als het land de Amerikaanse plannen in het conflict met Iran rond de Straat van Hormuz zou dwarsbomen. De groeiende spanningen zorgden voor een stijging van de olieprijzen.

De Dow-Jonesindex eindigde 0,5 procent lager op 53.459,78 punten. De breder samengestelde S&P 500-index sloot met een verlies van 0,5 procent op 7745,06 punten en techgraadmeter Nasdaq zakte 0,3 procent tot 26.644,91 punten.

Ondanks de spanningen gingen meerdere grote tech- en chipbedrijven toch stevig omhoog op de beurzen in New York. Positieve mediaberichten over AI-bedrijf Anthropic zorgden voor optimisme over de AI-rally in de tech- en chipsector.

OpenAI has signed a 10-year lease for an enormous Ohio data center that will eventually provide 8 gigawatts of computing capacity and require at least 10 gigawatts of new power generation. According to OpenAI, Nvidia will be supplying the chips and guaranteeing up to $105 billion in lease and power obligations. From the report: The facility -- which will be built and owned by SoftBank's SB Energy -- illustrates the immensity of the computing and power needed to fuel the growth of the AI economy. The data center will have 8 IT-gigawatts of computing capacity, powered by 10 gigawatts of new energy generation, on private land and federal property formerly used for uranium enrichment.

Nvidia -- which will be the exclusive provider of chips to the site -- agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion in conditional lease and power payment obligations to SB Energy, according to an SEC filing (PDF). The so-called "land, power and shell" deal structure could allow for multiple upgrade cycles for new generations of Nvidia infrastructure at the site, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on X.

A massive 9.2 gigawatts of new gas-fired power is ultimately envisioned for the Ohio project, which U.S. officials say Japan is funding under the 2025 trade and investment deal. SB Energy and SoftBank "will build at least 10 GW of new energy generation," a joint announcement from Nvidia, OpenAI and SB Energy states. Nvidia also said today that it's investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy to back its "continued evolution into a leading AI infrastructure developer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: PJM Interconnection, the biggest U.S. grid operator, proposed on Thursday a new framework that would force data centers to use back-up generators when electricity supply on the grid approaches dangerously low levels. The grid operator's proposal dovetails with President Donald Trump's Ratepayer Protection Pledge, a non-binding initiative to protect residential customers from getting saddled with costs related to data center power consumption, PJM said.

A new emergency procedure would notify utilities to reduce or transfer the electricity demand from data centers and other large power users ahead of any action that would shut off traditional consumers such as households. PJM said it does not, however, currently have the authority to curtail power to those sites and would require the cooperation of individual state governments.

PJM manages the electricity for 67 million people in a territory that stretches from Washington, D.C. to Chicago. Its proposal highlights a growing tension between the rapid expansion of data centers and the ability of the nation's power grid to keep up. If PJM cannot close its supply gap, millions of residents and businesses face an increased risk of blackouts, and the cost of new generation could be passed on to other power consumers. At its recent capacity auction, PJM hit its $325-per-megawatt-day price cap but still came up about 6.8 GW short of its projected reliability needs.

With rapidly expanding data centers adding pressure to the grid, PJM has also proposed creating a registry to track their locations and power consumption.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pornhub's parent company will pay $120 million to settle claims that its platforms violated federal sex trafficking and child sexual abuse imagery laws.

The deal settles two 2021 class action lawsuits in California and Alabama that claim Mindgeek, which has since rebranded to Aylo, profited off of child abuse material allegedly posted by abusers to its platforms. In the California case, a woman alleged that her ex-boyfriend posted child sexual abuse videos of her when she was 16 years old to Pornhub. In the Alabama case, two women claimed to have been trafficked as minors and that their trafficker uploaded videos to Mindgeek's sites; one of the women claimed she was drugged and raped at 16, and that her abuser profited off of the videos of her abuse through Pornhub's Modelhub program. 

The class includes anyone who was under the age of 18 "when they appeared in a video or image that has been made available for viewing" on a Mindgeek-owned or operated website between February 12, 2011 and December 6, 2024.

Mindgeek was bought by Ethical Capital Partners and rebranded to Aylo in 2023. Aylo will pay into the settlement fund with an initial $25 million in 2026 followed by six annual installments over the next six years. In a press release, Aylo noted that the settlement "resolves the matter with no admission of liability or wrongdoing by Aylo and remains subject to court approval." 

In addition to paying $120 million, Aylo agreed to a series of content moderation terms, including verifying that all of the models in uploaded content are over the age of 18, human and automated review of content to prevent child sexual abuse material from going up on its sites, and reporting suspected abuse material to the relevant authorities. Aylo's sites have implemented many of these injunctive reliefs agreed to in the settlement for years. 

Pornhub Will Pay $5 Million Over Allegations of Hosting Child Sexual Abuse Material

Pornhub’s parent company Aylo and its affiliates settled a lawsuit with the FTC and Utah that alleged the company “deceived users” about abuse material on the site.

In late 2020, following allegations of abuse material on the site and being dropped by major credit card processors including Visa and Mastercard, Pornhub overhauled its trust and safety measures to ban downloads, restrict uploads to verified users, and expand its moderation processes. It also launched its “Trusted Flagger Program" — mentioned as part of this settlement's terms — which allows a group of non-profit internet and child safety organizations around the world to immediately disable content it flags as abusive. In early 2021, Pornhub implemented biometric identity verification for uploaders through Yoti, and in 2024, it started requiring written proof of consent from everyone in every video.

The attorney for the plaintiff class did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Over the years, we have put in place robust measures to help protect our platform from abuse. Only verified content creators can publish on our platform, and every upload is subject to a combination of technological tools and human review by trained moderators before it goes live, to confirm that it complies with our Terms of Service, Community Guidelines and related Policies," Aylo management said in a statement. "Many of the commitments in this settlement reflect practices we already have in place. Trust and Safety should be a priority for every online platform, and we all share responsibility for a safer online experience. Every day, our trust and safety and engineering teams work alongside law enforcement, advocacy groups and other stakeholders to prevent online abuse and to hold those abusers to account.”

USS Benfold lost power after ‘engineering casualty’ leaving sailors without galley services, toilets and air conditioning

A US guided-missile destroyer reportedly spent four days adrift and without power in the South China Sea in July, furthering concerns about strain being placed on deployed military members.

The USS Benfold, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer which had been sailing with the George Washington carrier strike group, was reported to have been towed to Subic Bay in the Philippines, according to the US Naval Institute News, an independent military publication.

Continue reading...

Lawyers seek dismissal of state charges after Mangione pleaded guilty in federal case over Brian Thompson killing

A New York state ⁠judge on Monday ⁠effectively ​postponed Luigi Mangione’s trial on murder and weapons charges over ⁠the 2024 killing of a health insurance company CEO, after Mangione pleaded ⁠guilty last week to separate federal charges.

The ​trial had ‌previously been ‌scheduled to begin on September 8. Mangione ‌has pleaded not guilty to the state charges. Mangione’s lawyers on Friday asked New York state justice Gregory Carro, who is overseeing the state case, ‌to dismiss the charges.

Continue reading...

MPs, friends and campaigners gathered to remember former Cambridge professor after his death on Friday

Tens of thousands of people gathered in Trafalgar Square in London to remember and pay tribute to Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor who died on Friday.

Stand Up to Racism, which organised the vigil, estimated that 30,000 mourners had gathered in the square to listen to emotional speeches from MPs, friends and campaigners on Arday’s life and legacy and join in a minute’s silence. Many were dressed in black and held flowers, which they were asked to leave beneath Nelson’s column. People also carried placards reading “rest in power”.

Continue reading...

• Kevin Lamour said Fifa administration was ‘deceived’

• Chief operating officer knew he could lose his job

The Fifa chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, has been sacked after openly criticising Gianni Infantino’s ill-fated plan to sell parts of the World Cup to private investors.

In a significant development at the pinnacle of world football’s deeply troubled governing body, Lamour has departed less than two years after joining from a previous role at Uefa. He had come out strongly against Infantino’s FFE scheme after it was revealed, saying Fifa’s administration had been “deceived” and that the president “believes he embodies Fifa when he is supposed to be at its service”.

Continue reading...

President says US carrier is ‘beautifully maintained’ and calls CNN ‘fake news’ over reports of poor conditions

Donald Trump claimed he had third-hand reports that the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is “beautifully maintained” despite extensive accounts of deteriorating living conditions during its lengthy deployment in the strait of Hormuz.

At the White House on Monday, the president berated a CNN reporter at a press availability, insisting that she “be quiet” and describing the reporting as fake news.

Continue reading...

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon's book buying operation, which hasn't been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination. [...]

We first learned that AI companies wanted to scan millions of books for training data because of a lawsuit from book authors against Anthropic, which revealed Anthropic's "Project Panama." The goal of the project was to acquire books from commercial bookselling marketplaces, cut the spines off the books, and scan them. It's possible to scan books without destroying them, but cutting the spine makes it cheaper and faster.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

De Spaanse middenvelder was volgens verschillende media dicht bij een overstap naar Real Madrid, maar tekent een contract bij aartsrivaal Barcelona.

Anthropic-oprichter Dario Amodei droomt van AI-systemen die klimaatverandering helpen tegengaan, een eind maken aan allerlei ziektes en economische groei aanjagen. Tegelijk schetst hij extreme doemscenario’s: wat als de modellen verkeerd worden ontwikkeld of in verkeerde handen vallen?

Two weeks off, but how many days of relaxation?

Godnondeju

Social

Marco van Basten, de beste nog levende Nederlandse voetballer ooit, liet alweer zeven jaar geleden het verhaal van zijn leven optekenen in Basta, een openhartig boek, vooral waar het gaat over zijn trainerscarrière. Zo deed hij uit de doeken al na de eerste pot bij Heerenveen te willen stoppen, maar door een speling van het lot bleef hij toch nog twee jaar aan als trainer (anekdote bij DWDD vanaf 7:35 hieronder). Dat boek (lees ook Het Mysterie Marco) moest natúúrlijk worden verfilmd, niet alleen omdat het zo'n beetje de helft van de totale Hollandse voetbalgeschiedenis beslaat, ook vanwege al die iconische goals - knappe acteur die de omhaal tegen Den Bosch nadoet - en een beetje voor de mens Marco, een rare, eigenzinnige vogel (een zwaan zo u wilt). De trailer is nu daar zodat we vast kunnen zien wie Cruijff speelt, wie Danny Cruijff speelt, wie Berlusconi speelt, wie Gullit speelt, wie papa Joop van Basten speelt, wie vrouw Liesbeth speelt, wie Aad de Mos speelt (niet Aad de Mos zelf), wie Ton Harmsen speelt en wie Marco speelt: Chris Peters. Vast geen pannenkoek. Marco's eeuwige Capitano Baresi stierf bijna drie weken geleden, gelukkig is Marco wat enkelvoudiger gehavend en zit hij hopelijk snel weer bij RONDO aan tafel om heel geconcentreerd naar zijn glaasje water te staren.

Social

Vooruit, nog even de échte

Social